What’s Next?

Wikipedia! That abode of knowledge, free for all people to edit and read, committed to providing an encyclopaedic and unbiased point of view!

HA!

As we all know, Wikipedia is anti-conservative, anti-Christian and anti-American. What we need is another encyclopaedia that isn’t stifled by political correctness, liberality or impartialness. An encyclopaedia that doesn’t wimp out and use CE on their date - I present Conservapedia! The encyclopaedia that isn’t afraid to get the truth out.

For example, Unicorns!

‘The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times. Christian apologists have advanced various arguments that the biblical unicorn was not a fantasy animal. ‘

Controversial!

The Entirety of the Descent of Man article really covers the main points:

“Charles Darwin wrote Descent of Man in 1871.

A quote from the work reads:

‘Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate the savage races throughout the world … The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.’

Many believe the evolutionary ideas have contributed to racism.”

Damn those godless racist evolutionists….will they ever learn?

And now I feel bad, because I was going to mock it because most of the articles read like a 15-year old’s history notebook…but that’s exactly what it is. Conservapedia is at least in part a communal reference point for home-schooled kids. Wikipedia is often too detailed for the notes needed for school kids and I can see how something like this could be helpful. Sure there’s the occasional humorous turn of phrase, like in the Gutenberg article:

‘Some historians claim that the printing press had already been invented in China before Gutenberg, but this is debatable as no one in the West was aware of it.’

But I think we have to let it slide. What’s really worrying is that this is a reference guide with no pretence at being impartial. Its half-school notebook and half-propaganda piece, the Evolution article is completely undeserving of the name, an article on a Hate Crimes Bill states one of the problems with the bill as:

‘ Someone who murders a gay person could get sentenced to life in prison while a person who murders a grandmother coming back from the store with cat food would serve less time.’

…Cat Food? Really? It’s comical, but someone writes it and doesn’t want these children to think any other way. God forbid children encounter anything that might challenge their worldview.

It’s depressing, but is Wikipedia any better? Is there anything to their list of complaints against it? It’d be silly to say there was no bias in Wikipedia but it’s hardly as systematic (and obvious) as Conservapedia. To be fair, the discussion pages show there are people who recognise how ridiculous some of the articles are, but they’re argued down by bullying admin. There probably is room for a Conservapedia that isn’t ridiculous, that really does draw attention to any slight liberal bias in Wikipedia, but it can’t do that while these small minded people run it.

I don’t think I can ever get tired of this site, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the kids who are raised in this little ideological bubble.

Rush also believed that being black was a hereditary illness which he referred to as ‘negroidism’. Wikipedia.

Reading this sentence you’re immediately stuck by a comment that seems positively racist, indeed knowing Benjamin’s Rush’s time period, it would neither be out of place or unexpected. However, the next sentence changes the meaning somewhat:

He also believed that since it was merely a skin condition slavery and racial discrimination should be abolished.

Now this turns the whole assumption on it’s head. Of course, all skin colour is a hereditary skin condition, it’s just rarely worded as such. The statement as a whole still jars with our modern sensitivities because of the word ‘illness’, which as being black itself does not cause negative symptoms (Of course, being black in that time and place would hardly have been beneficial to your health) and should not be seen as needing ‘cure’ is not strictly accurate. Replace it with the word ‘condition’ and you get:

Rush also believed that being black was a hereditary condition which he referred to as ‘negroidism’. He also believed that since it was merely a skin condition slavery and racial discrimination should be abolished.

Most of this statement would be almost redundant today, while being 100% factually true (but still carrying some unfortunate overtones). The idea that racial characteristics are hereditary is obvious, the word ‘condition’ still seem slightly out of place, but is a neutral word when used in the scientific sense (’a particular mode of being of a person or thing’) and so is correct without racists overtones. This brings us the Wikipedia problem: I have the ability to go in and change that one word and potentially change the opinion of someone quickly flicking through the page away from the more racist interpretation. However, I don’t know enough to be sure that Rush didn’t see being black as an illness. So while the revised statement would be more factually correct in itself, might it become a less factual account of what Rush believed? Is it right to add political correctness retroactively? I would argue only if the historical interpretation remains true. While in a scientific sense the word ‘condition’ almost certainly fulfills what Rush believed, if the word he actually used was ‘illness’ then that gives historians a more accurate insight into his character. So to change a single word without research would be misleading.

Looking into the legacy versions of the page it’s interesting to note the second sentence was added a long time after the first, meaning that for a period of time a radically different impression would have been drawn from the paragraph, as an incorrect impression may or may not be given now. So what’s the lesson here? That Wikipedia articles shouldn’t be taken at face value? In part, Wikipedia should always be used in conjuncture with another source and no-one using Wikipedia for serious research would disagree with that. Perhaps the second point demonstrated is that Wikipedia articles tend to follow a trend from less correct to more correct, factual errors are slowly eroded by the occasional informed reader who spots the difference, it is rare for a correct fact to be edited to a less correct version (ignoring the issue of vandalism for the moment). This is most true in a selection of articles that have been subject to more readers, and hence more correction than most. As Wikipedia grows (it’s important to remember that it’s only been around for five years), it’s content as a whole will doubtlessly mature in a similar slow trickle towards correctness.
The issue of Vandalism is perhaps of more concern, this progression towards correctness can only continue as long as occasional readers arrive at the page with a small amount of independent knowledge. Most vandals restrain themselves to replacing whole articles with hilarious messages and this vandalism can quickly be reversed and the vandals banned and ignored. What would be truly destructive is a class of vandals who make small changes on obscure pages but retain the impression of factualness and impartiality enough to fool the unknowing reader. As it would require a reader with external knowledge to correct the vandalism, it would become progressively unlikely to happen the more obscure the article. Indeed as it would be so hard to catch, it’s impossible to imagine that this is not happening. This leaves us with at least three potential classes of vandals:

• Petty article-defacing vandals who are irritating but relatively harmless.

• Vandals with an agenda who, for example, ‘correct’ opposition political party entries (or ‘enhance’ their own). These will usually be easily reconisable though, as the pages they edit tend to be fairly prominent and on which a biased viewpoint will quickly be spotted and have Wikipedia’s ‘neutrality’ flag hoisted on them.

• Vandals who make tiny alterations to articles, preserving the formal structure yet introducing errors for the sole goal of creative destruction.

It is this final category that I find to be most dangerous, as their actions would be almost indistinguishable from simply uninformed contributors their existence is hard to determine and it’s entirely possible that they don’t exist. However, simply the idea of a potential group dedicated to factual incorrectness brings home the importance of not taking Wikipedia at face value. Hopefully the changes being made to prevent casual vandals will take away some of this problem, but for the moment ‘cautious optimism’ is the only assessment I can make on the factuality of any given Wikipedia article. I hope Wikipedia in another five years will have an unrivaled quantity (and more importantly, high quality) of articles and still be providing them freely to the masses.

I wonder if it will still say ‘illness’.